It's Christmas so I got the Doodlebugs busy today making their very own Christmas trees! I've discovered that I love the magical world of Crayola Air Dry Clay. The stuff is amazing... easy to work with and it can be coloured and moulded into just about anything you can imagine.

We used tempera paints to dye the clay (since I bought only white) and they got to experiment with mixing colours... creating swirls etc. and kneading the colour into the clay. Boy did they enjoy this! So each child made one blob of green for the tree and one colour of their choice. Then we all shared the extra colours to make little decorative balls to stick on the tree.

Just put this little guy to sit on something sturdy and voila! A cute little decoration that's extra special because it was made by extra special little hands. :)

This afternoon the Picassos were given a little assignment... not a test... an assessment! Of course it took the form of a cool little painting assignment. I demonstrated how to draw the three cats in the style of Laurel Burch and when everyone had their cats on the page they were told how they were to complete the picture!

These were the instructions;

Choose a single pattern for each cat and paint using the dry on dry technique.

Paint 1 cat in a WARM colour scheme and the other 2 cats using a COOL colour scheme.

Use the correct brush for the correct area.

Your background must be a SOLID PRIMARY colour.

Cats must be outlined in black.

I must say I am pretty impressed with my little Picassos. This assignment not only tests some introductory art skills, it is also a test of how well they can follow instructions (which as we all know is not limited to the art room!)

Take a look at our results!

Thursday Picassos were put to the test next and they rose to the challenge :) Take a look at their work!

This afternoon the Doodlebugs got to use some pretty cool painting tools. I brought out some paint rollers and scrapers to create some texture in this little art piece, needless to say they could hardly contain their excitement :P

We used the rollers for the sky and the scrapers to create the effect of waves in the ocean. I pre-cut some shapes that could be put together to create a sailboat and placed them in the centre of the table for them to choose which ones they wanted to use. These are the results!

Today the Picassos were introduced to the Impressionist style of painting. This just happens to be my favourite era and so this group of artists are near and dear to my heart, needless to say I was excited to get them to love it as much as I do :)

I found a series of videos done in a very relatable cartoon style on a range of artists and styles while on my hunt to get something on the impressionists... (hint; it's not the last you'll see of Mati and Dada)

Now that we know what is it's time to paint like an impressionist! Visible brushstrokes, an explosion of colour and blurring of lines.. I think these artists did pretty well!

Thursday afternoon Picassos took their turn at the impressionist sunset!

This afternoon was all about getting the Picassos to build on what we have done so far and introducing them to yet another painting technique called the dry brush technique. I chose a fairly simple yet beautiful scene for them to recreate because I don't want them getting caught up in worrying about getting the drawing right today... but rather to get focused on actually painting and using different brush strokes to create different effects.

Today the focus was again on directed line drawing and getting the doodlebugs to see how familiar shapes could come together in different ways to make a picture! So we brushed up on our basic grizzly facts...

And away we went... drawing then painting these not so ferocious bears ;P

This afternoon the Doodlebugs got to paint and decorate their very own deya! I didn't have very many rules... I simply put out the paints, gems, glitter and of course the deyas and they did their own thing!

Needless to say the aftermath looked like a glitter bomb exploded... all in a day's work!

I was looking for a unique way to acknowledge Divali this year and came across this practice called Rangoli Art. This amazing video shows some artists at work creating some intricate designs using coloured chalk.

To mimic this result I got some simple rangoli designs and let the kids transfer them onto black paper. Once the designs were down they coloured them in using chalk pastels! It was the first time many of them used chalk pastels so of course there were multi-coloured hands and lots of smudging but it was a fun process and it's only our first foray into this new medium.